14 Feb George Orwell and the Immigration Debate
My American Greatness column tomorrow is about Pope Francis and his ongoing inability to distinguish between matters of faith and salvation on the one hand, and matters of politics and policy on the other. Specifically, it’s about the Pope’s determination to stick his nose into this nation’s immigration debate and to use his immense authority to take partisan sides.
As you might have guessed, I consider the Pope’s behavior both inappropriate and destructive – to the Church and its moral authority, not to mention the consciences of American Catholics. And as you may also have guessed (given that I have done so before in these pages) I cite Thomas Mann on this matter, using the case he made in his Doctor Faustus, that the Church’s biggest mistake in the post-Enlightenment world was deigning to defend itself and debate the rationalists on their terms. “Orthodoxy itself,” Mann wrote, “committed the blunder of letting reason into the field of religion, in that she sought to prove the positions of faith by the test of reason.” That was and remains an impressively stupid mistake.
In this note, I would like to address another important yet rarely discussed aspect of the immigration debate, the language used to frame that debate. To that end, I will cite another author and another few passages that I have cited more than once before.
As I have noted repeatedly, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell discussed the intimate and inarguable connection between the decay in the use of the English language and the decay in the effectiveness of the pronouncements made in that language. Poor usage reflects poor thinking; poor thinking reflects poor usage. Each is both a cause and a symptom of the other, and each compounds the other, almost endlessly. Language, Orwell wrote, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,” and the “slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Nowhere does this symbiotically destructive relationship make itself more obvious than in politics. “The present political chaos,” he continued, “is connected with the decay of language.” He went on: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Once upon a time – if I had to guess, I’d say up to about a decade ago – the words “migrant” and “immigrant” were two distinct words. The first, when used as a noun, meant someone who moved around, was itinerant, someone who traveled, usually to keep up with seasonal work patterns. “Migrant” farm workers, for example, may have worked during the winter months in California, picking oranges and grapefruits, in Minnesota in the summer, picking tomatoes and strawberries, and in Washington state in the fall, harvesting apples. By contrast, an “immigrant” was someone who left their home country and moved to another one, for any of a variety of reasons – personal, professional, political, whatever.
At some point during the Obama administration, the differences between these two words began to be eliminated. In 2013, the Associated Press stylebook stopped using the term “illegal immigrant” to describe those who had immigrated to the United States illegally, and started using the term “undocumented immigrant.” The word “illegal” was deemed insensitive and dehumanizing. Immigration activists and others (including the AP) took their cue from Elie Wiesel, a man with immense and unimpeachable moral authority, who, in 1988, declared that “no human being is illegal.”
Although Weisel had more than earned the right to say whatever he wanted and to refer to anyone in whatever terms he chose, his immense stature in the human rights world, unfortunately, encouraged deterioration in the language. The word “illegal” in the terms illegal immigrant or illegal alien did not designate a person as illegal, merely their immigration status. Nevertheless, others repeated the “slovenly” usage and, by early last decade, the word was no longer acceptable in polite company. And thus began the perversion of the language in this discussion.
The shift in usage from “immigrant” to “migrant” is not quite as easy to pin down, although I suspect that it began just before Donald Trump took office the first time. The great European immigration crisis began in 2015 and, for whatever reason, the European press preferred to use the term “migrant” to describe the participants in the crisis. The American press and political activists discovered soon thereafter that the term sounded softer, less harsh, and they too took up its usage, first to describe those invading Europe and then to describe those immigrating to the United States. First, they abolished the use of “illegal,” and then they abolished the use of “immigrant.” Step by step, they destroyed clear language and clear thinking.
Today, the word “immigrant” might as well not exist. Migrant is the preferred term, almost everywhere – including on Fox News and among conservative journalists and essayists. Even Rod Dreher, who is as socially conservative as they get and who moved from Louisiana to Hungary, in part because of Hungary’s immigration and cultural policies, uses “migrant” in his everyday writing. That is, apparently, the only acceptable term, despite the fact that it is inaccurate and, as such, enables deception and creates political and moral chaos.
One of the chief arguments forwarded by supporters of unfettered immigration is the idea that their position is the only truly moral one, the only acceptable conclusion of what Pope Francis calls “the rightly formed conscience.” To support this argument, they inevitably cite the plight of the Holy Family as “migrants” and the subsequent religious doctrines supposedly based on their plight. The Pope puts it this way:
Even a cursory examination of the Church’s social doctrine emphatically shows that Jesus Christ is the true Emmanuel (cf. Mt 1:23); he did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life, and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own. The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration. I like to recall, among other things, the words with which Pope Pius XII began his Apostolic Constitution on the Care of Migrants, which is considered the “Magna Carta” of the Church’s thinking on migration:
“The family of Nazareth in exile, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, emigrants in Egypt and refugees there to escape the wrath of an ungodly king, are the model, the example and the consolation of emigrants and pilgrims of every age and country, of all refugees of every condition who, beset by persecution or necessity, are forced to leave their homeland, beloved family and dear friends for foreign lands.”
The catch here is that this explanation and this application of Jesus’s own experiences only works if the people coming to Europe and the United States today are described as “migrants” rather than immigrants. The Holy Family, of course, did not stay in Egypt permanently. They returned home to Nazareth, where Jesus was raised. They were indeed “migrants,” not “immigrants,” and only the intentional conflation of the two terms enables their story to be manipulated to support an ideological position. Surely, Pope Francis knows this, just as surely as he knows that the point of the entire episode is to liken Jesus to Moses, not to make the case that nations should have no borders. He chooses to say otherwise, however.
In any case, everyone, these days, is a cuttlefish, spurting out deformed language that creates gaps between implied and real intentions. That’s not to say that well-meaning people of goodwill cannot take differing positions on the immigration question. Of course they can. Rather, it’s to say that the debate, such as it is, has been deformed and debased, marred by a purposeful manipulation of the language.
Orwell knew what he was talking about, in other words. Unfortunately.
